Software | Information | Community

May 2013

Shorter edition than planned today…I was slightly hampered in production by video driver crashes and the associated blank screen every 30 seconds, all followed by my first Windows 8 RTM blue screen of death!

Software

WCF Data Services 5.5.0 Release – The WCF Data Services team announce the offical release of the WCF Data Services 5.5.0, released via NuGet. The release includes a major re-enhancements of the URL Parser, and implementation of Public Data Providers, as well as over 40 bugfixes

ReSharper 8 EAP Build: JIT Edition – With just days to spare on the expiry of the last EAP the JetBrains team announce their latest EAP edition of ReSharper, featuring more refactorings, XAML Grid inspection and refactorings and much more.

EF6 Beta 1 Available – Rowen Miller announces the availability of the first beta release of Entity Framework 6, with runtime available via NuGet and tooling as a download from the Download Center, and a significant number of enhancements and changes since the early alpha releases.

Information

Getting up to speed with Katana – Jon Galloway discusses the basics of OWIN and Katana before diving into why these are significant and exciting things for Web Developers, highlighting resources to learn more including whitepapers Channel 9 content.

What the meaning of is is – Eric Lippert explores the is operator in C#, discussing some of the slightly stranger aspects of its behaviour with nulls, and looking at what the operator actually means.

Code Review Checklist and Guidelines for C# Developers – Mohammed Hameed shares a good list of things we as developers should be checking in our code reviews. I would argue that a many of these should probably be checked by the developer working on te code prior to code review too.

How to debug silent crashes in .Net – Samual Jack takes a look at how you can go about debugging and diagnosing serious crashes in .NET applications where your application level error handling is not able to catch the error

Software

Download Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 RC 2 – Microsoft Downloads have the second release candidate of the Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 available for download now. This RC is a ‘go-live’ release and includes improved agile planning tooling for TFS along with a number of bugfixes across the whole product.

Get /httpclient/rtm – 200 OK – Immo Landwerth announces the RTM release of HttpClient 2,1 available as a stable NuGet package and for production use. This release’s main feature is the ability to use HttpClient in Portable Class Libraries

Information

Edge.js – Running Node.js and .NET in One Process – Shiju Varghese takes a look at the exciting world of Edge.js which brings together Node.js and .NET code, providing a powerful bridge between the two environments and allowing hybrid applications to be created

The State of Entity Framework and NHibernate – Ricardo Peres discusses two of the main competitors for ORM functionality on the .NET Framework, looking at how they differ as projects, and possible advantages for Entity Framework by being backed as a part of the framework, with a dedicated team.

Flight Mode – Libraries – Aaron Powell continues this interesting series looking at the options for offline storage in web applications, exploring some of the wrapper libraries which put a wrapped API on top of the different storage APIs.

Information

.NET Security Part 4 – Simon Cooper rounds out his series on .NET Security with a look at a number of security issues which can cause problems when working with sandboxed application domains

Monitor don’t log – Peter Gillard-Moss discusses the difference between implementing logging in your application and making your application able to be monitored, and why monitoring is probably the more important.

Is the Windows user ready for apt-get? – Scott Hanselman asks if Windows users are ready for application package management in the style of apt-get, taking a look a the closest thing available in the form of Chocolatey

The responsibility of public disclosure – Troy Hunt continues his discussion of vulnerabilities in other peopels production sites, discussing the ethics and efforts he has gone to in order to report issues to site owners before disclosing publically

Flight Mode – FileSystem API – Aaron Powell continues his series looking at the possibilities for offine / local data storage with web applications, exploring file system access in this post.

Understanding .NET Just-In-Time Compilation – Tsvetomir Y. Todorov discusses the .NET JIT compilation, looking at the various stages, and processes involved, before briefly discussing how frameworks like JustMock get involved in the compilation process